Echoing Frank Harrell's impassioned letter to Steve Martin asking him to make movies that don't suck so much, my favorite Salon critic and party conversationalist, Stephanie Zacharek, considers Why Good Comedians Go Bad. As the subhed yearns to know, "Remember when Steve Martin, Albert Brooks and Woody Allen were funny? What on earth happened to our favorite funnymen?" Stephanie writes:

In Shawn Levy's gaspingly unfunny "The Pink Panther" -- not a remake of the Blake Edwards original, but a version of some vague idea of the original -- Steve Martin may play Inspector Clouseau. But at least he's smart enough to know that he can't play Peter Sellers. In the movie's production notes, Martin says, "I bent it a little bit because I am a different person. When I looked at those movies, I understood that Peter Sellers could ad-lib all day within the context of the character." Martin knew he had to reinvent the role, which he did mostly by devising an identifiably Martinesque faux-French accent that sounds like a speech impediment.

Martin's Clouseau is a performance draped precariously on a thumbtack of a gimmick. "The Pink Panther" is lousy for many reasons: For one thing, its rhythms wobble and weave drunkenly, and even the potentially funny jokes hang in the stratosphere, twinkling dimly with far too much space around them, before crashing to earth. But because "The Pink Panther" is a star vehicle, Martin has to bear most of the blame. Like another recent disappointment from a comedian many of us long ago came to love, Albert Brooks' "Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World," "The Pink Panther" cements the idea that, no matter how much faith we place in our favorite comedians, their presence alone is never enough to guarantee laughs. Brooks' and Martin's recent failures carry a particularly potent sting: How can comedians we've come to trust so much let us down so hard? Cont'd.

In Slate, Dana Stevens writes:

Let us now ponder the mystery of Steve Martin's career. In the past decade or so, it's diverged into two discrete and contradictory channels: There's Steve Martin the auteur (of three novels, a collection of plays, and "serious" film scripts like Shopgirl or the upcoming Picasso at the Lapin Agile, both based on his own work); and Steve Martin the lowbrow, the shameless purveyor of crap like Cheaper by the Dozen, Parts 1 and 2, Father of the Bride, Parts 1 and 2, or Bringing Down the House, the Martin/Queen Latifah race comedy, which has mercifully stopped at Part 1 (so far.) Cont'd.

Ever the optimist, I'd like to end this by saying I didn't know they were making Picasso at the Lapin Agile into a film! I saw the play and liked it a lot. I'm looking forward to that. In the meantime, Steve, if you must remake silly '50s comedies, how about The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer, or Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House ('48 and '47, but you know what I mean)? Or a new His Girl Friday with, say, Geena Davis? There are so many others. We could make you a list.